A SHABBY AND GOUTY EMPEROR, a mercurial and disintegrating king of France, a broken titan of England, sick of
body and melancholic of mind, and a septuagenarian pope
who suffered from a "flux of blood" and a weak stomach: the leaders of
Christendom were indeed a scruffy lot. Sickness hung over them like a
cold fog through which good health shone with increasing rarity. Methodically the Emperor Charles had kept a calendar of his gout--
eleven attacks in sixteen years--but by 1544 anxiety and gluttony
had made a travesty of the documentation; the pain had become so
frequent that he gave up recording it. Nothing, however, could curb
his appetite. He knew that live oysters, pickled eels, spiced Spanish
sausages and German ale would be the death of him, but he could not
stop, and in desperation his physicians cried out that "kings must think
that their stomachs are not made like other men's." In later life matters became even more desperate, for a cleft lip made chewing difficult
and the Emperor preferred to wash down his food with great draughts
of Rhenish wine. Overindulgence was not without the sharp reminder
of conscience. All the world knew that the lash of gout was administered by God to punish the rich and mighty, and Charles, like his
"good uncle" of England, was wont to listen to that inner voice which
ordered him "in no event and for nothing in the world" to "act against
duty and conscience."
1

Of the three sovereigns, the worn and unassuming Charles, who had
lived as many years as the century and had perambulated the length

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